California. NNC Stories

On Thursday, February 7th, 2019. Tarana Burke the civil rights activist and creator of the “#metoo” movement, visited Sacramento and gave a speech to many people at a free event at Sac State University.

Martin Luther King Jr. was renowned for his achievements as a political activist in civil rights. But many people don’t know that just before he was assassinated, he strived to solve the problem of poverty in our nation. King wanted the government to eliminate poverty by providing every US citizen a guaranteed middle-class income and a job. He didn’t want to just alleviate poverty but to also raise the American society into the middle-class. King argued that the guaranteed income should be “pegged to the median of society” and it would, therefore, raise the standard of living for many people. He contended that his plan was feasible because he noted an estimate by John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist, that the government could create a guaranteed income with $20 billion dollars a year. As Mr. Galbraith said, King’s economic plan was “not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by ‘experts’ in Vietnam.”

With that in mind, the third annual “Reclaim MLK: This Was Not The Dream!” march will be held on January 15th, 2018 between 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM, starting at the Safeway market at 1025 Alhambra Boulevard in Sacramento. This march is hosted by Black Lives Matter Sacramento, SURJ Sacramento, and the Gender Health Center. The goal of this MLK march is to bring unity and to rally the power of the people against racism, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, homelessness, poverty, and fascism. The march will end at the Sacramento Convention Center, 1400 J Street, where the Diversity Expo will be held from 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM.

Black Lives Matter Sacramento, SURJ Sacramento, and the Gender Health Center collectively made a statement, “We will not be aligned with an event tainted in capitalism or sponsored by the very law enforcement entities that are killing us in the street, but with the people! Join us!”